It's hard to adjust for inflation because the cost of living differed greatly from place to place - just as it does today. The American West was expensive; the South was not.

The famed '49ers hoped to "make their pile," meaning they wanted enough to return home or to the Midwest to buy a farm. $10k was regarded as the goal - representing about 35-40 pounds of gold. A few of the '49ers achieved this. It was better odds than the lottery, but it wasn't as good as many of the games at the casino.

The '49ers worked in small teams and relied on labor and luck rather than on sophisticated technology. With little invested upfront, they hoped to turn muscle power into wealth, and at the outset, the California Gold Country was filled with enough gold to allow for hundreds to "make their pile."

Western gold mining eventually shifted from the extensive exploration and working of broad swaths of territory to the pursuit of intensive gold veins that led underground. This required sophisticated technology and laborers. Underground mining also allowed for lucky owners to become millionaires - something that was not possible among the early surface gold miners.

Here, we can glimpse what the price of gold meant with regarded to "subsistence of a family." The Comstock mines in Nevada were remarkable for paying at least $4 per day for underground miners. Elsewhere, this was often $3 or $3.50 per day. Henry Colt in his factory in Hartford, Connecticut proudly paid workers a remarkable $1.25 per day - 10 or 12 hours while Comstock miners worked 8 hours per day. Canal ditch diggers in the 1840s/50s earned fifty or seventy-five cents per 12-hour day - barely subsistence wages.

That's the spectrum that one encountered in the mid nineteenth century. Miners who earned $4 per day were earning about the equivalent of one of a half ounces of gold for a six-day week - and they were living very well at that. Consider that as the equivalent of a modern skilled factory worker making $200 per day (thanks to unions!).

If you're interested in historical price comparisons, measuringworth.com is a useful tool. There is no single correct way to translate values from the past into the present. But they helpfully provide both calculators based on historical price series, and also the explanation for which calculations might best suit your needs.

In your example, we come to an important fork in the road quite early: are we interested in the gold, or in the $USD that gold buys? Since you're talking about subsistence for a family, I assume the latter. $18.95, reflated via the consumer price index to the present day (2020), is about $405. If you want to get a sense of "about how much is that in terms of supporting a family," that's the number you probably want. It's not perfect; the basket of goods you buy to support a family looks more than a little different in 2020 than in 1800. And, of course, the question of where one is spending the money would change the price level both then and today. But it's less misleading than other estimates.

If you wanted the modern price of that same amount of gold, that's more like $1,800, because the $USD has depreciated in terms of gold over that period (or gold has appreciated, same thing). But since your miner cannot time travel to 2020 to sell their gold, this number is basically irrelevant for your purposes.

Measuringworth.com also provides ways of measuring this as a share of the total economy, or the equivalent ratio to per capita GDP, and a bunch of other possibilities which yield numbers in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. But I don't think those reflect any meaningful part of the question you're interested in.

Much thanks to u/itsallfolklore and u/IconicJester for your detailed answers. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear about the information I was looking for. I should have been more specific. My character isn't a miner, but rather just a very poor guy in Virginia who wants to sell some (stolen) gold jewelry and is hoping to save up enough money for a $20 train ticket to New Orleans.

I was trying to get a sense of how much actual gold he'd need get in the neighborhood of $20. And since a troy ounce of gold was worth $18.95, I was trying to determine if he only needed about an ounce of gold.

I realize that the piece of jewelry would have been cut with other metals and not be pure, but those are different calculations. I was only concerned at the moment with how to interpret that chart and whether the $18.95 was in 1899 dollars or our dollars. From your answers, I infer it was in 1899 dollars.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks,

Mary.